High Performance Teams

This page will cover how to build high performance teams, a subject near and dear to my heart and at the core of any world class IT organization. If you would like to help me and collaborate on this area, let me know by providing me feedback in a comment for this page.

So far I have assembled a set of practices that I have leveraged or I have seen peers or other senior IT leaders use to build high performance IT teams in these reference pages to enable managers to have a robust source of practice at their disposal. Senior IT leaders, with his or her senior management team, can use these practices to build a high performing team, in the following steps:

Tech industry insights…

- More outages: Another spate of systems failures this summer including: NYSE, United Airlines, and most recently, NatWest... Of course, some outages will occur despite best efforts and investments but repeated issues over several years (such as at United and RBS) have raised further concerns....

- Night shifts can impact health: A growing body of medical studies is pointing to the growing importance of adequate regular sleep and potentially the negative impact of shift work on a worker's long term health. IT organizations need to recognize this potential issue (mentioned years ago here) and minimize shift work impact especially through 'follow the sun' locations and encouraging workers on shift to get adequate sleep.

- Fresh, Simple, Elegant Alarm app! Latest version of Wakebrightis now on iTunes. This top-rated alarm app can help you get a great start to your day. Check it out and let me know what you think!

- What to read: In this day and age of soundbite news clips, short, racy internet articles, and Twitter, a lengthy (38,000 words) paper has become one of Bloomberg's best read articles - What is Code. It is a thoughtful, well-written piece to explain software and how it touches our modern world.

Our Modern Tech World :)

- Responding in Klingon seems most appropriate for UFO queries When asked for details on UFO sightings at the Cardiff airport, the Welsh government replied "jang vIDa je due luq. ach ghotvam'e' QI'yaH devolve qaS. " Apparently this translates to "The minister will reply in due course. However this is a non-devolved matter."

- Spotify has a musical map of the world that mashes up geography and songs that are listened to heavily in one location but not others.

About the author:

Jim Ditmore is the author of Recipes for IT. He has extensive experience as a senior IT manager in the financial services and telecommunications industries. His career focus has been stepping into poor performing IT organizations and transforming them into teams that provide world class services and a competitive edge for their companies.
The views expressed on these posts are Jim's and not that of any company he is employed at currently or previously. Please feel welcome to contribute to the discussion here and the improvement in the practice of IT management.